Insider's View: Wally Dallenbach

It's become common over the last few seasons for Winston Cup teams to bring in road racing "ringers" for the two races each year at Sonoma and Watkins Glen.

	Wally Dallenbach

There are eight specialists on the entry list for Sunday's Sirius Satellite Radio at the Glen, all with impeccable road racing resumes. But I still think it's really tough for someone to come in for once race, work with a team and put together the whole Winston Cup package and grab a win.

Boris Said and Ron Fellows came pretty close back in June at Infineon, however. Boris put the MB2 U.S. Army Pontiac on the pole and ran with the leaders a lot of the day while Ron qualified the DEI Pennzoil Chevy third and was in a position to possible win before getting mixed up on pit road.

Those two guys are back this weekend along with the likes of Trans-Am star Johnny Miller who will team with P.J. Jones for a two car Morgan McClure effort and former CART and Cup regular Scott Pruett in a Chip Ganassi Racing entry.

Like I said, those guys are excellent road racers, but I still think it's going to take a monumental effort to pull off a win. In fact, the last time a non-Winston Cup regular won a road course event was back in the 1970's when Mark Donohue pulled it off at Riverside, so it's been a while.

There's a bunch of Cup guys who are pretty good road racers themselves. And we saw a lot of drivers and teams use one of their seven test dates to work on their road course programs, like current series point leader Matt Kenseth. Matt hasn't been particularly good at the road courses and with every race being so important in the hunt for the championship, the DeWalt team decided to tune up their game.

Throw in the Sonoma winner Robby Gordon, seven-time road course winner Jeff Gordon, Mark Martin who has 13 top-10 finishes in 15 career Watkins Glen starts and the re-energized Rusty Wallace, who has always been good at the road circuits, and the Cup regular side of the slate has some pretty strong forces.

Tony Stewart is the defending Watkins Glen winner and I think he'll be especially pumped this weekend after his Indianapolis disappointment last Sunday. Tony's a good road racer and the additional incentive to avenge last week's Indy showing will be a lethal combo.

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Robby Gordon will also be tough. Remember last year when he had a chance to win at the Glen only to have the television telemetry system in his car short out and start a fire. That was a freak deal to say the least and Robby might have one coming.

Jeff Gordon also should be back at the front this weekend. He's still a solid road racer despite his recent drought and that team knows if they have any chance of closing the gap to Kenseth in the championship chase they're going to have to win.

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